Re:Why Crystal Is My Next Language
by brokencode on Monday June 11, 2018 @06:57PM
(#17289345)
It’s not enough to have good “theoretical” performance when other languages already have measurably good performance today. I’m not trying to say that Nim is bad or slow, but when there are a dozen similar static, compiled languages to choose from, it’s easy to dismiss one based purely on the benchmarks alone. I understand that it’s sort of an optimization game with these benchmarks, but it’s at least a form of marketing, which is something that Nim can benefit from.
So what do I mean by theoretical performance? Well, Nim is a statically typed and compiled language, it stands to reason that these attributes make it very performant indeed. Even if certain aspects of the language are not efficient right now, you can bet that it will be fairly trivial to improve their performance. For languages like Python, Ruby, etc. you are heavily limited by the dynamic typing (which restricts the amount of information you have about the code) and the fact that they are primarily interpreted languages. You will need to put far more effort into optimising them than compiled languages.
As a side note, I do intend to improve the performance of Jester as well. But I'm not the only one doing this, the mofuw framework is #24 on the TechEmpower benchmarks right now.[1]
1 - https://twitter.com/nim_lang/status/1004849910699712513